"Perhaps you wonder just where in the hell is the spineless major media in all this, as they watch the chicken-hawk Shrubster himself, between golf swings, announce how tens of thousands of American troops are being sent to the Gulf alongside an enormous billion-dollar military buildup and imminent gobs of heaping death raining down upon a paltry oppressed nation and coming up next on CNN, we interview that dumb guy from "Joe Millionaire." Perfect.
Perhaps you wonder where is the national TV coverage of all those huge anti-war protests, hundreds of thousands of people, all over the world, from Spain to Berlin to New York to San Francisco.
Perhaps you wonder where are all the "serious" journalists, the risk-taking news agencies pointing up the absurdity of it all, the imminent horror, the outrage. Could it be these news agencies are owned by major conservative corporations? Could it be they're all terrified of losing ratings, of saying something unpopular, of invoking Cheney's wrath, of losing advertiser dollars and that ever-precious, ever-dwindling dumbed-down audience? One guess. " - Mark Morford, SF Gate, 01/10/03
Where, indeed, are the major media outlets? The very function of the fourth estate is to keep the electorate apprised of the activities of the nation's leaders through timely, accurate and unbiased reports. Yet we see little, or none, of such reporting, except in the small independent media outlets. Most of the American media is toeing the Bush administration's party line on the looming war with Iraq. None of the mainstream media outlets are asking questions regarding the state of the "War on Terrorism", after all Osama bin Laden and most of his lieutenants remain at large. Yet this glaring failure of the Bush administration remains unquestioned. Let's not forget those embarassing questions about president Bushs' and vice-president Cheneys' business dealings as private citizens that were conveniently swept under the rug with the shift of focus to Iraq.
Where is the coverage of the growing anti-war movement in the US? At home, it is spotty and erratic at best. One can find more and better infornation in the foreign press about goings on in the US. And this is a sad commentary on the state of the American press corps. They are so cowed by their corporate masters that they fear to criticize the Bush administration lest they be fired and blacklisted.
